Conference calls are often held as a way to conduct meetings without requiring that the participants physically occupy the same space. Conference calls can therefore save time and resources, by allowing participants to monitor or actively contribute to the content of a meeting from their office, home or other location. However, this also provides the opportunity for a participant to become engaged with other activities, and become distracted from the content of the conference call, particularly where the agenda for the call includes a long list of items and/or items that are not of interest to the participant.
During a long conference call, a participant can listen to the entire conference call and wait for their turn to contribute or for topics of interest to be reached. However, this can mean that the participant spends a considerable amount of time listening to topics that are of no interest to the participant, wasting the time of the participant and lowering the participant's productivity by taking him or her away from other work Alternatively, the participant can take another call, respond to an office visitor, engage in email correspondence, or perform other work or activities while waiting for agenda items of interest to be reached. As a result of this multi-tasking, the participant can loose track of the agenda items being covered in the conference call, and miss important discussions of items that the participant is interested in or should be contributing to.
In order to assist in ordering conference calls and helping participants track what items are being covered, various techniques have been devised. For example, outlines or agendas may be distributed to participants prior to the conference call. However, agendas in the form of documents are unable to provide anything more than an estimate of how long each agenda item will be covered during the conference call. In addition, the value of documentary agendas becomes reduced when the host or other participants address items out of their indicated order.
Internet based multimedia applications have also been developed for assisting participants in following a conference call. Although such applications can provide a user with real time presentation of video or textual information, in addition to voice information, they do not provide any special indication to a multi-tasking participant of agenda items that are of particular interest to the participant, such that the participant might be alerted to re-engage with the conference call.